Glenn Beck and Scott Turner are joined by the HUD Secretary, Scott Turner, to talk about Paul Krugman, the dumbest SOB on the planet, and how to keep your kids safe in a time of crisis. Plus, a story about a woman with a burner launcher.
00:00:46.880Also, the HUD secretary, Scott Turner, was with us, and we talked about Mr. Krugman, the dumbest SOB on the planet.
00:00:55.940We take him on, and what he said about tariffs and everything else, with Bayard Winthrop.
00:01:02.580He is the CEO of an amazing American company making clothing.
00:01:06.900And now, because of his partnership with Walmart, his making quality American t-shirts and selling them for 12 bucks couldn't have been done five years ago.
00:03:16.020Well, because he would say about, you know, his op-ed on make sweatshops great again.
00:03:22.820And I just had to see his ridiculous case, and then I just couldn't stop writing.
00:03:27.680I don't even know if I started that monologue now.
00:03:30.540I don't even know if I get to the end of it by the end of the show.
00:03:32.860So I kind of just vomited, you know, Paul Krugman truths, and I can't wait to share as much of it as I can next hour.
00:03:43.940But I wanted to start with something that I, you know, that Jessica Krause, do you know who she is?
00:03:53.840It's Friday, so I just, I want you to know, I'm going off the rails just a little bit, but this is what she wrote on her sub stack.
00:04:00.060Back in January, I predicted a split, too many divided sightings, too much distance, and Michelle Obama's absence at the inauguration was telling.
00:04:09.440From the outside, they appeared to be leading separate lives, but the bigger story was whispers of his affair.
00:04:16.020Don't get me started on the chef's drowning.
00:37:35.200Yeah, I got to tell you, Glenn, this is such a classic example to me of an economist in a white tower that has never taken the time to get out and get on the factory floor and understand what's actually happening in an industry.
00:37:45.940I mean, he is just wrong on so many levels on this point.
00:38:41.600And do we like those jobs maybe even particularly for workers that choose not to go to college or that are first-generation Americans?
00:38:48.240And I'm firmly in the camp of saying we need an economy that provides lots of jobs for every level of the economic sector, not just for people that are working in California.
00:39:00.620I think the second point is, and you made this point earlier, industries are integrated and interrelated.
00:39:06.320And if you knock out one key tentpole, the whole thing gets unstable.
00:39:10.080I'll just give you two quick examples of that.
00:39:11.420But the textile industry is fundamentally involved in the military and supporting the military and, in case we forget, PPE during the pandemic.
00:39:21.060For those of you, and Glenn, I know you know this, but for those of you who maybe have forgotten, we had lost the ability to make gowns and masks.
00:39:27.340And, in fact, our facility in North Carolina and a handful of other facilities that are still making things here had to retool our plants to make masks to get them onto frontline workers that were trying to save people that were sick.
00:39:39.120And that was taking a T-shirt facility like mine and totally changing what we do every day.
00:39:44.360So we had basically effectively lost that capability and handed it over to China, and China was throttling the supply of those things to us.
00:39:52.480So it is not as simple as saying socks.
00:39:55.220The textile industry is a very dimensional, very broad industry that I think is actually quite fundamental to the viability of the country.
00:40:02.040And, Byron, as I look at this, there's only two ways to go.
00:40:06.700You just concentrate on one industry and one that is already putting more people out of work through AI than any other industry, and that is the tech sector.
00:40:17.460So you can concentrate on that and say that's the only one that matters.
00:40:21.400But if you let everything else fail, you have two choices.
00:40:26.860You have to fund, because you can't afford to do it any other way, you have to fund the steel plants and everything else.
00:40:34.660So we have some way to make something in case there is an emergency, or you just encourage people to continue to make these things.
00:40:46.380So when things do break down, and they always do, we have the ability to live.
00:40:54.560It's like if every farmer was so – and believe me, the government would like to say this to every farmer and rancher – we don't need you anymore, because we can get that food cheaper someplace else.
00:41:08.680Well, and part of that conversation is about control, that if industries move wholesale, overseas, you lose control of those industries.
00:41:18.780So whether that's pharmaceuticals or textiles or ag, eventually if the control and the capability shifts entirely overseas, you are at those countries' mercy.
00:41:28.720So there is a fundamental – and in my perspective, and I think this is broadly shared, that it's a national security conversation as well.
00:41:35.420Now, I'll say one other thing on the tariff comment.
00:41:38.460Right now, what is happening in textiles in China is unconscionable.
00:41:43.200It is essentially being used slave labor, subsidized work to underpin our industry.
00:41:49.200And tariffs, in part, begin to mitigate that differential.
00:41:52.460So everyone thinks about this as a warping economic factor.
00:41:55.460And I actually think that that's a mischaracterization of it, that we are asking our domestic facilities, in textiles and outside of textiles, to compete on a completely uneven playing field.
00:42:06.140In some ways, it's at its most dramatic in textiles.
00:42:08.660And to level that back out again and put American factories and workers back into a position where they can compete, I think historically, whenever we've done that, we've outcompeted our international competitors.
00:42:17.700So it is, in my mind, a very necessary step towards rebalancing this and giving our industries a chance to get reinvigorated and restarted again that we've essentially let go for the last 40 years.
00:42:29.200And by the way, mainstream economists have been consistently wrong on this issue.
00:42:33.400And Krugman nods at this in his article, like, I will concede.
00:42:36.680Yeah, well, that is, that's the story here, that there's this postulating from some hill until finally saying, oh, I've gotten this wrong and reeling it back little by little.
00:42:46.580But they have been wrong on this issue for 40 years.
00:42:49.240So it's nice to see finally an administration that's beginning to turn the clock back a little bit on this.
00:42:53.720So when you see the tariffs, because I'm not a tariff guy.
00:42:57.940However, what Trump is talking about with tariffs are a couple of things.
00:43:02.260One, if you're an enemy of our country, China, there's no such thing as a level of playing field.
00:43:07.880We'll do what we have to do because you're an enemy of ours or you're at least a unfair competitor of ours.
00:43:13.460With Mexico and Canada, tariffs that I'm really not happy the way they're being handled, but I understand what he's trying to do.
00:43:21.140Let's make sure that, A, we return as much industry here as we can.
00:43:25.980But also, you've got some very unfair trade with us, so we'll just mimic what you do.
00:43:34.160And I think what people really miss is Donald Trump knows the end of total globalism is over.
00:43:54.720Where do you stand on the tariffs and if you're seeing anything, for instance, in your field that where they're working or that looks like they might work?
00:44:03.240Well, I hear you on tariffs being a blunt instrument.
00:44:06.760I want to make one point, though, that is directly relevant to us.
00:44:10.420As you know, we were approached by Walmart about two years ago, and they were trying to make some progress on making stuff in the United States,
00:44:20.300a piece of which was textiles, and they needed some help and guidance.
00:44:23.540That partnership ended up in us now having a line of T-shirts in Walmart that are retailing for $12.
00:44:29.400I want to just stop on that for a second because what that means is you have American Giant and Walmart coming together,
00:44:34.660two pretty unlikely partners, and through their commitment to volume and a time commitment over time with us,
00:44:40.420allowed us to work with our industrial partners through our supply chain to get a T-shirt on the shelves for working Americans for $12 at retail.
00:44:56.340And that is a window on maybe what tariffs can do.
00:44:59.800And your concerns about them notwithstanding for a moment,
00:45:02.660it does provide a fence around industries that give them time to invest and amortize their investments.
00:45:08.500And in that regard, that really is a hopeful sign for me because I think in a lot of industries,
00:45:13.640we need a bit, a moment here to breathe, get retooled, to invest a little bit with some confidence that that marketplace is going to be viable for a bit to put us back on a more competitive footing.
00:45:23.880So I think it is a piece of the puzzle about this reindustrialization effort that we need to engage in now.
00:45:29.360So the other thing is, you know, you just brought up $12 T-shirts, which is fantastic.
00:46:06.680I mean, if you'd asked me whether that was possible, I would have said maybe we can get to $19 or $20.
00:46:12.720But what happened there, to be clear, is that that partner, Walmart, stood up and said,
00:46:18.440we're going to commit to you for a long period of time and at a high volume.
00:46:21.760And that is what the marketplace has lacked in every industry, because it's been cheaper and easier for all of these big corporations that are getting fantastically rich to just offshore.
00:46:30.500And so to have some mechanism to say, wait a second, there's an incentive to actually stay here.
00:46:36.400Amazing things happen beyond even what I thought.
00:46:38.000You and I talked about this at some point off the air years ago about the structural challenges about textiles.
00:46:43.040And that's a big one, which is it needs a commitment of time and a commitment of volume.
00:46:46.960And tariffs do do that in some degree.
00:46:49.900And I think that is going to create some market turbulence for a bit here as we kind of rebalance the economy.
00:46:56.260But it is going to provide, I believe, in some measure, a bit of that breathing room to allow industries like ours to stand up a bit and get going again.
00:47:04.320So it may not be the sole answer, but I'm grateful that there is some movement finally happening here.
00:47:30.920But we're talking thousand dollar phones from Apple, iPhone.
00:47:37.120Well, gee, I can't afford that thousand dollar phone.
00:47:40.920Well, if that thousand dollar phone is made unethically in what really is modern day slavery at a scale the West really never considered, even possible 200 years ago.
00:48:13.960I mean, if you think about the United States, you know, our our our citizens have put into place laws that we care about,
00:48:20.160that we fought hard over, that we've debated publicly and landed on some measurement of OSHA standards to make factories safe and environmental standards.
00:48:28.800So we're not dumping textile dye into waters.
00:48:31.740And for us then to say, well, wait a second, we're going to apply that to our factories,
00:48:35.280but we're not going to apply it to some factory in Xinjiang, China, where we're going to allow some massive apparel organization to go over there and exploit that differential.
00:48:43.320It's it is it's those two things are inconsistent and they drive me wild to drive me wild.
00:48:49.000And by the way, you know, 40 years ago, that wasn't the case.
00:48:52.220Forty years ago, 95 percent of the clothing we bought was made in the United States.
00:48:55.940And as far as I can remember, we could afford it back then.
00:48:58.180We could afford a T-shirt and a sweatshirt and they were the envy of the world.
00:49:01.320And this trade policy that has opened the floodgates by a bunch of really smart economists sitting up at Harvard have gotten it wrong,